Beyond State and Hegemony: International Orders as Anarchic Meta-Fields.

This article develops a Bourdieusian practice-based framework to conceptualize international orders as "Anarchic Meta-Fields" (AMFs), emphasizing the interactions of sovereign state elites within a global social space characterized by multidimensional forms of capital and doxic (taken-for-granted) practices. It disaggregates traditional realist notions of hegemony and order, distinguishing between material and ideational forms of power, and argues that international order can exist without a singular hegemon, allowing for diverse configurations of power beyond imperial or hegemonic dominance. The framework is illustrated through an analysis of the Cold War as a composite AMF comprising four heteronomous subfields—superpower, liberal, socialist, and non-aligned—each with distinct distributions of capital and practices. The paper concludes by proposing further research avenues, including dynamic analyses of order and transformation, highlighting the framework's potential to capture a broad range of international social configurations without relying on universal assumptions of rationality or historical progress.